Slipknot, posed at the Big Day Out Festival, AustraliaMartin Philbey/Redferns/Getty

4 of 5

Slipknot at the Ozzfest Concert, July 16, 2004, at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New JerseyGeorge De Sota/Redferns/Getty

5 of 5

SlipknotMick Hutson/Redferns/Getty

Last updated at 12:06PM, May 26 2010

Founder and bass player with the thrash metal band Slipknot which specialised in menace and alienation

Paul Gray was a founder member of Slipknot, the multi-million selling American
heavy metal band who became to the new millennium what the shock-rockers
Kiss had been to an earlier generation of teenage music fans. Their music,
known as “nu metal”, was loud and brutal in its aural intensity, its sense
of alienation emphasised by the band’s insistence on only ever being seen on
and off stage in scary rubber face masks. Indeed, when Gray was sentenced to
probation for drugs offences in 2003 and his police mug shot was leaked on
the internet, it was the first time the